in 1996, we created the Seattle Peoples' Internet by co-locating our equipment at an upstart internet cafe in Belltown called Speakeasy.
The deal was that we paid for their most expensive monthly line item: the T1 circuit. We covered 100% of the T1 yet were allocated only 50% of the bandwidth, if I recall. We recruited enough co-op members to cover that fee before beginning and had a wait-list on Day One.
Our PortMaster was configured to monitor monthly bandwidth consumption per co-op member. We accommodated spikes in traffic of individual members, but if the aggregate went above some threshold, the co-op would pay more to Speakeasy. The intent here was that our overage fees would help pay for a second T1.
We also had some co-location hosts in their rack, which was around the corner from the coffee machine in those days.
Member fee schedule was proportional to type/speed of connection used and anticipated usage. Beyond that, membership was at cost.
Internally, co-op members would resolve financial details among ourselves, and we sent one payment check per month.
The agreement was fairly balanced. It allowed our members physical access to reboot a piece of co-located equipment, but any maintenance required pulling and removing the machine. (Again, rack was in tight quarters of a coffee shop.)
Since this was mid-1990's, all members supplied their own pair of modems for each side which were mostly 28.8 back then. I think one person was going with ISDN, and maybe another had Telebit Trailblazer 56k.
I'd like to think that upon seeing how this was a benefit to the cafe's financial statements that it gave Mike, Gretchen, Chris, et al the idea to move into the larger ISP space for which they then became known.
I was a Speakeasy DSL customer in the late 90s. They were great, IIRC it was the line sharing deregulation was what did me in as a customer. They got priced out. We hosted our own Q3A server on that connection. So many happy memories.
Awesome. Did you guys host gave servers? Or perhaps co-op members? For some reason I remember a lot of game servers with "Speakeasy" in the name – I think this would have been Q2/Q3A/CS1.6 days
SPI did not directly have game servers, but yes, at least one of our members ran one. I don't recall if it was a MUD or something else.
Speakeasy also had other co-location hosts in the rack. If I recall, one was for a design firm somehow connected to one of the owners. Maybe there was a game server there, too.
Ah memories. I remember daydreaming as a teen for being rich enough to have my own T1 at home. If you had a T3 you were royalty. Usually at a university.
I'm glad that more people are now thinking of mesh, or radio-delivered, internet.
I think there is a lot we can do (as programmers) to start supporting mesh-network style Internets. We're at a critical point right now where distributed systems research has turned up some decent consensus algorithms, where there's now a (finally understood) need for a computer network run by the people who use it, and where consumer radio/copper technology is fast enough to start building out reasonably fast networks.
"We're at a critical point right now where distributed systems research has turned up some decent consensus algorithms,"
Not by a long shot. We have proof of work and systems that rely on all parties being known and identifiable, and not much else. Proof of work does not scale and the need to identify all parties requires at least some centralization. Beyond that, we also live in an age where the bulk of Internet traffic is video, and thanks to the decades-long effort of the RIAA and MPAA, most video distribution is centralized, so people demand high throughput; and the widespread use of TCP also requires low latency. Mesh networks are still not up to the task despite all the progress.
You want to support mesh networks? Great! I'm with you, but let's not oversell the state of the art. Mesh networks are still experimental and without some centralized coordination (which is a de facto ISP) the performance and reliability really start to become questionable.
High throughput is 'easy' to obtain if you don't mind high latency. The only thing the internet is great at is reducing latency. Luckily for human scale actions this is not a big problem.
Mesh networking technology is old at this point. Application layer software that takes advantage of it's strong suits has yet to be developed. Though there are many ideas of where to start.
As for what you have brought up. In my opinion many-replica content networks, when combined with modern video compression technologies, could solve the issue of video streaming from a no-master and high-latency system.
Actually, I think global consensus is overused. There is no need to use consensus for most things. To achieve consensus at all costs you'd need to merge forks no matter how many updated happened in the meantime, which is usually not what you actually want.
See for example https://intercoin.org project we're working on. Specifically the Technology link.
I helped set up a wireless mesh network in St Louis (though others were much more instrumental than I was) - combined with building and giving out free linux computers, we got hundreds of people online that wouldn't have been able to otherwise (pre smartphones)
I'd argue that this sort of project would solve the same problem that net neutrality tries to.
The root problem is that if an ISP starts throttling content, a lot of customers won't have another ISP they can switch to. Something like a mesh network (high-latency, high-bandwidth) would be perfect for what most people want (Netflix, Facebook, etc.). Mesh networks being widely available would force ISPs to provide actual value to their customers.
There's an apartment tower near my house, and I've toyed with the idea of renting space on their roof to set up a small local cooperative ISP. The demise of net neutrality has caused this idea to bubble back up to the surface. Of course I need to compute the business case -- how many neighbors do I need to sign up, in order to make it attractive.
I've been doing stuff like this for a long time. I've thought about trying to build a web app to help with estimating the costs of doing exactly this. Would that be useful to you? I wouldn't charge for it, but it would help me get motivated to do it if I knew someone might use it!
At @tomcam's suggestion I put together a quick spreadsheet outlining some of the costs associated with building a wireless Internet network, feel free to check it out:
That would certainly be interesting. At present, I don't know squat about any of this, except to imagine that I'd have to pay for some sort of super high speed cable to the building, run it up to the roof, build some sort of radio station up there.
Maintenance would be a chore, as mentioned in one of the other posts.
But an app that lets people begin to think about how this stuff works -- for instance what the pieces consist of, might hit pay dirt if the whole net neutrality thing gets nasty.
I've also thought about the idea of what people could do if they set up some kind of mesh network in a higher density urban area -- for instance if they could use it to bypass the ISP's while maybe also improving their security and privacy.
Well y'all have me convinced! I'll get started and be sure to post here when I have something presentable. In the meantime anyone interested drop me a line at my email in my profile and I'll keep you posted. Would love to have some outside perspective on what's important to include.
If you know what you're doing, you should be able to figure out a break even point, but it's probably more than you would want to spend, and getting people to sign up is likely difficult. One of the bigger issues is support. Do you really want to be responsible for why your neighbors kids can't get on wifi?
I live in Michigan and it's not going to happen. These people are too poor to pay. The big companies weren't interested in providing free service to this large an area. This group formed because there simply weren't any other options.
Up in Northern Michigan there are areas where there is no telephone service, no cable or Internet. That's because there are too few paying customers thus it isn't cost effective to service the area. In Detroit there are tens of thousands of potential customers but they lack the ability to pay.
Curious, what path would they take to declare this illegal? Under current legislation I can’t think of how an internet coop funded through charity could be deemed illegal.
This has a lot of of similarities with the german Freifunk[0] initiative. Although the philosophy is different. (They work as WISP and let people sign up for the service. Freifunk distributes APs that anyone can plug into their internet connection and provide Freifunk connectivity in their street. Anyone can connect to it).
Now this is fantastic! I started a company to build a platform specifically for local intranets like this to run social software. We should get in touch and help their Apps program.
What kind of equipment are they using for this? Is this something that is affordable for testing out? I was thinking of trying something like this at my cabin.
Like many people I would guess, I know what a 'citizen' is, and I know what 'Detroit' is, but I wouldn't know what a 'detroiter' was.
For example if I wrote an article about 'Wollybacks building their own internet' would you know what that meant? That's a name for people from where I live.
A member of a state/nation. For example, I am an american citizen, not a new york citizen. Citizen has historical etymological roots to ancient greece and their city-state but the word has changed in meaning in modern times.
> Like many people I would guess, I know what a 'citizen' is
Apparently you don't if you think someone is a citizen of detroit. At least in the US, we are citizens of the nation, not a city. I don't need to get visa or permission to move from NYC to Detroit. I don't have to change citizenship if I move from NYC to Detroit.
> but I wouldn't know what a 'detroiter' was.
So you don't know what a new yorker is?
> That's a name for people from where I live.
Detroit is one of the major cities of the US. Pretty sure everyone knows what detroit is.
I don't know what a "yorker" is, never mind a new one.
To be fair though, I'm guess you meant one of these two; either a "New Yorker" (citizen of the state of New York), or a "New Yorker" (citizen of the city of New York, New York).
Or would that second one be a "New York, New Yorker?"
The new new New Yorker was new to New York, New York. New New York is known for it's saturation with new New Yorkers. Now I know that would be a bit nuanced, but nevertheless I knew you as a new New Yorker of "The New New York" (New York) would find it relevant. I just didn't know if you knew that yet.
"... is a grammatically correct sentence in American English, often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity and the usage of homophony and homonymy."
"More easily decoded, though semantically equivalent, would be:
Buffalo from Buffalo...
whom other buffalo from Buffalo bully...
[themselves] bully buffalo from Buffalo."
For example, I am an american citizen, not a new york citizen
You’re willing to argue with what is almost the American dictionary of record? I’d think one would have to roll a 20 against Giant Balls of Pedantry to pull that off.
The deal was that we paid for their most expensive monthly line item: the T1 circuit. We covered 100% of the T1 yet were allocated only 50% of the bandwidth, if I recall. We recruited enough co-op members to cover that fee before beginning and had a wait-list on Day One.
Our PortMaster was configured to monitor monthly bandwidth consumption per co-op member. We accommodated spikes in traffic of individual members, but if the aggregate went above some threshold, the co-op would pay more to Speakeasy. The intent here was that our overage fees would help pay for a second T1.
We also had some co-location hosts in their rack, which was around the corner from the coffee machine in those days.
Member fee schedule was proportional to type/speed of connection used and anticipated usage. Beyond that, membership was at cost.
Internally, co-op members would resolve financial details among ourselves, and we sent one payment check per month.
The agreement was fairly balanced. It allowed our members physical access to reboot a piece of co-located equipment, but any maintenance required pulling and removing the machine. (Again, rack was in tight quarters of a coffee shop.)
Since this was mid-1990's, all members supplied their own pair of modems for each side which were mostly 28.8 back then. I think one person was going with ISDN, and maybe another had Telebit Trailblazer 56k.
I'd like to think that upon seeing how this was a benefit to the cafe's financial statements that it gave Mike, Gretchen, Chris, et al the idea to move into the larger ISP space for which they then became known.